I’m not sure I want them to be able to make deals like that in the first place. As you pointed out prosecutorial discretion results in a clear pattern of more privileged defendants such as serial rapist Cosby getting lighter sentences. I see this as a clear flaw of the American justice system and one far too many Americans are simply resigned to because they feel powerless to change it. And when something like this happens because some piece of shit DA made a deal with a serial rapist who incriminated himself in a deposition, and that serial rapist is now going to walk free because he had the money to pursue it to the state supreme court, it’s hard to blame them for feeling helpless.
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I’m not certain you’re replying to the right person, I didn’t take issue with anything the author said or say anything like the quote you included. If anything I wrote gave the impression that I was endorsing a straw man argument, I apologize for that.
My point is that this is a story difficult to discuss in some ways because recognizing one completely valid aspect can, very understandably, give the impression that one is downplaying or dismissing the other aspects. That makes things tough.
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Yeah, the whole plea bargaining system needs to be rethought. I don’t think it should be completely eliminated, because there are some positive benefits, but outcomes like this are completely unacceptable.
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You are absolutely correct that it is far easier for rich, powerful people to vindicate their rights than others. That is fundamentally unjust. I would respectfully suggest, however, that there are, in fact, a lot of people who spend their professional lives trying to make that system more fair and just.
Or perhaps this DA figured he could boost his reputation by scoring an easy win on the civil cases and didn’t care if he torpedoed any future criminal cases in the process.
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At the risk of speculating, I think anyone who is venal enough to throw their lot in with Trump is also a prime candidate to be swayed by the kinds of things someone as wealthy as Bill Cosby could do for him. He’s a legitimately terrible human being as well as being a terrible lawyer.
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We lavishly reward private defense attorneys who work for the wealthy and underpay and overwork people who wish to serve the people as public defenders. Even public prosecutors get paid better than public defenders.
Every aspect of our criminal justice system reveals our real goals as a society, which is to keep poor and especially POC incarcerated. It’s working as intended, as it’s a white supremacist system that punishes POC and the poor. The US has around 2 million people in prisons or jails right now, the highest number in the world.
We are failing and are a police state that does not have an equitably system. The good people working to correct that are up against a well entrenched system that too many people benefit from.
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I think you’ve got it precisely. It wasn’t that this guy was corrupted by Trump, but rather he was the kind of moral cretin all along that would fall into Trump’s orbit.
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Right. IMHO the travesty here was that he was given immunity in the first place, not that the justice system eventually had to deal with that reality. If anything, it’s unfortunate that it took two years to reach this point, because it suggests someone without Cosby’s resources would take significantly longer to have their rights restored.
No way should immunity be given to rapists, in any context, but especially just because money happened to be involved.
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No apology needed. You didn’t mention the bogus argument that led to a lot of the acrimony here as being true, but given said acrimony it was worth pointing out that his snarky comments were an exception to what you were discussing in that they did indeed minimise the other aspects.
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If anyone’s blood is not boiling yet:
That ghoul Dershowitz has showed up almost on cue.
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This is another part of this whole story that irks… because of who he is, he got a deal that most others would not get.
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“What does that say about a woman’s worth? A woman’s value? Do our lives mean nothing? All of the lives that he damaged, not to mention our children and how we respond to our children and our personal relationships. He’s impacted the lives of well over 60 women.” -Victoria Valentino (Cosby Victim)
My heart goes out to the other 60 plus women he raped and/or molested. JHC
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Alan Dershowitz helped negotiate the non-prosecution agreement that let pedophile rapist Jeffrey Epstein stay out of jail for years, enabling Epstein’s continued human trafficking ring, not to mention working on the defenses of O. J. Simpson, Julian Assange and Harvey Weinstein, so I’m certainly not surprised. Dershowitz really likes defending rapists.
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Rapists are a subset of the folks he likes to defend. Broadly speaking the trend is very, very rich and definitely guilty.
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And abusive to women, which given that Dershowitz is a misogynist also comes as no surprise.
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It’s looking like there was no agreement of immunity in the first place - it was the DA not wanting to prosecute, and not wanting his replacement to prosecute, claiming that there had been a “promise” not to prosecute that suspiciously was never written down and for which there was no contemporaneous record. Which means this whole thing is BS:
The real travesty may be that that never even happened in the first place, but a number of people are pretending it did. (see twitter thread above) It’s even screwier than it seems. Whoo boy.
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Well, I appreciate that you think we’re underpaid. I tend to agree. But, just so you know, it’s not really a hard and fast rule that prosecutors are better paid than public defenders. The averages may work out that way, I’m not sure, but there are plenty of places where there is parity or the public defenders might make a little more.
I also can’t speak for all PDs, but I can say with a high degree of certainty that nearly 100% of those I work with think this was a good ruling and would have hurt a lot of defendants had it gone the other way. Those cases don’t make the news so it’s easy to focus on people like Cosby, but prosecutors wouldn’t let the ability to make a deal like this and renege on it go unused.
FWIW, there is a real tension in this discussion that you get at in the heart of this. You correctly point out that the criminal justice system is set up to punish POC and the poor, and that we are an outrageously carceral state. Those facts exist simultaneously with what can be a knee-jerk reaction to any time we see an unsympathetic defendant receive the benefit of a ruling like this. It’s a difficult tension, because I understand why it’s hard for people to feel anything but disgust when someone like Cosby is the beneficiary.
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It seems to me like getting bogged down in the armchair lawyering of it all is exactly what the beneficiaries of corruption want. The reason the justice system is so infinitely quibblable is to guarantee that if you spend enough money, you can lawyer your way out of anything.
If every criminal case were decided on the spot by a single judge, with no right of appeal, that wouldn’t be much more or less unjust, for normal people, than what we have now. But it’d be a catastrophe for important people, because half of them would be in jail. That, and that alone, is why we have juries and appeals and byzantine procedure.
The only part of this story where the system wasn’t working as designed is the part where Cosby actually went to jail for two years.
I understand why a lot of this kind of stuff seems like “quibbles” to folks looking from the outside, but I can assure you–vulnerable defendants would absolutely NOT be better off without the safeguards that can seem to be bogging things down. Of course, the fact that these safeguards too often aren’t enough is an argument to be more zealous about them, not less.
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